Abstract
THE session on “Science as a Humanity” held during the recent British Association Conference on “Science and the Citizen” is of good augury, for it is a further testimony to the fact, evident of late in many quarters, that the old rivalry of science and the humanities is a back number, and is rapidly ceasing to cast a cloud over the future of our national education. There has always been something unnatural about the controversy ; for, as Prof. J. L. Myres reminds us in his opening address as well as Dr. Waddington at the close, both the parties share a common parentage in the epoch of the Renaissance, inheriting there from an identity of aim and interest that is belied by their artificial severance. We can picture how Copernicus, Kepler and even Harvey would have recoiled from the suggestion that the study of classical antiquity was irrelevant, not to say inimical, to that of the sciences of Nature. If later generations have emphasized the contrast, to the detriment both of science and the humanities, the responsibility lies chiefly with a philosopher, Immanuel Kant. For Kant, science meant Newtonian physics ; man's moral personality and the entire realm of ethical and religious value were excluded from the knowledge of speculative reason and regarded as objects of practical faith. No wonder that such limitation of the scope of science provoked a protest, of which Wilhelm Dilthey was the leading champion in Germany, to the effect that over and above the sciences of Nature were the sciences of spirit (Geisteswissenschaften) which were none the less deserving of the name of sciences, though their objects and methods were poles asunder from those of mathematical physics.
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DE BURGH, W. SCIENCE AS A HUMANITY. Nature 151, 607–608 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151607a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151607a0